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Introduction
In the past decade, social entrepreneurship has been explored and referred to as the establishment of ventures to create social value and impact (Nicholls, 2006; Mair and Noboa, 2006; Martin and Osberg, 2007; El Ebrashi, 2013). It is differentiated from pure forms of social movements and charitable giving through the focus on creating business models that are economically sustainable (Austin et al., 2006; Yunus, 2006; Alter, 2006; Hockerts, 2010; Zahra et al., 2009; Mair et al., 2012). The discourse on social entrepreneurship is mainly focused on benefiting marginalized groups (Thompson et al., 2000; Nicholls, 2006; Martin and Osberg, 2007; Hockerts, 2015).
Schumpeter (1934) and Gartner (1989) emphasized that entrepreneurship is a onetime event, and that the entrepreneur loses the character as soon as the venture is established. However, Moore (1986) and Bygrave (1997) asserted that entrepreneurship is a continuous process, which includes constant innovation and working on the firm’s growth. Venture growth is the most important strategic decision entrepreneurs think of (Chandler and Hanks, 1994; Fernández et al., 2000), which involves a continuous process of pursuing opportunities through the combination of resources (Schoonhoven and Romanelli, 2001; Hitt, Ireland, Camp and Sexton, 2001; Hitt, Bierman, Shimizu and Kochhar, 2001). Similarly, working on the firm’s growth and spreading social venture impact is a unique social entrepreneurship behavior, as social entrepreneurs look for spreading impact and benefiting more stakeholders, and also increasing the social impact of their programs on current beneficiaries (Dees et al., 2004; Hynes, 2009; Bloom and Smith, 2010; Lyon and Fernandez, 2012; Santos, 2012). According to El Ebrashi (2013), what differentiates social entrepreneurs from their business counterparts that the former strategizes and measures social impact and outcomes as results of organizational activities. Maximizing impact and spreading impact to different areas and new beneficiaries (Weber et al., 2012; André and Pache, 2016) fall in the domain of social venture growth, which is crucial for social transformation and change (Dees et al., 2004; Nicholls, 2006).
Recently, there have been substantial number of published research on social venture growth strategies (cf. Dees et al., 2004; Mulgan et al., 2007; Grant and Crutchfield, 2007; Ahlert et al., 2008; Zahra et al., 2009; Bloom and Skloot, 2010;...